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In this article from June 2001 Durst talks about the possibility of a light rail line running up Eleventh from the 7 Line Extension. That would make all the difference in the world for this site, the new Riverside South site and any number of others on the far West Side.

GlobeSt.com: You've been involved in the revitalization of Manhattan neighborhoods before. How will projects like this change the tone of the far West Side?

Durst: Hudson River Park, which goes up to 59th, is now being completed, and from 59th to 72nd there is Riverside South. So that part of town is changing as we speak. For our part, we've started discussing the possibility of a light rail transit system on 11th Avenue, which would connect with an extension of the seven line. I think you're going to see a completely different Manhattan West Side in the next 10 years.

Of course, way back in June 2001 no one had any real idea of how completely different the world would be ten years on.

Earlier today Curbed turned up some interesting plans at the Department of Buildings. It looks like the Durst Organization may be making a move on a site it owns way out on 57th Street and 12th, overlooking the Hudson.

The plans call for a five-story commercial building on the site — a rather meager offering, it would seem. The Observer checked with Durst, and it looks like this is a technical maneuver. "We filed some as-of-right plans to maintain participation in a brownfield program," Jordan Barowitz, the firm's director for external affairs, said. That would be the state's brownfield cleanup program, which provides developers with tax credits for cleaning up contaminated sites before they build on them. Without the filing, the credits would have lapsed.

Could those contaminants be from the site's quirky former tenant? Per Curbed:

The humble Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp. warehouse has faced the Hudson River from across Twelfth Avenue for generations. With its classic hand-painted sign, this is where the old Times Square neon supersigns were built.

[...]

The two-story Artkraft Strauss building at the west end of the site, a colorful chunk of funk that was a favorite canvas of street artists, greets drivers barreling down from the elevated West Side Highway. Inside, artist Dean Radinovsky recently built a cinder block chapel of lights and memorialized it on YouTube.

As for preservationists who might be worried about losing the building, maybe the Dursts will be nice enough to save it like they did with the Henry Miller Theater at One Bryant Park.

Back to that filing. This seems like the last place anyone would want to build a commercial building — especially a tiny one like this, so far from the central business district and good transportation.

Given that this is an as-of-right filing, it seems safe to assume that something different is probably in the works for the future. Just next door, the Dursts rezoned a similar commercial site to make way for the Helena, a super-green, 38-story luxury rental. Maybe they've got the same thing in mind for Artkraft Strauss.

Barowitz would not say what the plan was beyond the filing.

While Douglas Durst has previously expressed interest in building a commercial project on the site, the more recent, and it would seem plausible, approach would be the residential route, which was picked up yet quickly set aside two years ago. With nothing much getting built in the city at the moment, the wait continues.

I hope that the new development will force ConEd to pull back from 3 year occupation of 58th street. They have heavy machinery on the sidewalk+ 1 lane for years where gigantic cables cross into building.. If you think this is crazy they have started to the same on 59th street, blocking the whole 2 lane traffic.. ConEd blocks sidewalk + 1 lane on both streets, I hope that the new constructions (durst and extell) block the remaining lanes so that they hit a deadend....

Bjarke Ingels: 8House makes for one achitectonic idea - which results in an orgy of various spatialities ...

8-House is located in Ørestad on the edge of Copenhagen. 8-House offers homes for people in all of life’s stages: the young and the old, singles, families that grow and families that become smaller. Instead of dividing the different functions of the building - for both habitation and retail - into separate blocks, the various functions have been spread out horizontally. The apartments are placed at the top while the commercial program unfolds at the base of the building. As a result, the different horizontal layers have achieved a quality of their own: the apartments benefit from the view, sunlight and fresh air, while the commercial merges with life on the street.